Copyright nazis kill Hitler parodies

Nobody knows how, why or exactly when it happened. In 2007, Hitler became an unlikely comedian on Youtube as amateur video editors took a liking to a scene in German film Downfall that showed Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) lashing out at his subordinates in anger and frustration over Red Army’s unstoppable march towards Berlin. The scene was anything but funny, yet the Youtube crowd somehow found humour in it and turned it into an internet meme that some proclaimed would live on for a thousand years. There is no documented history of Hitler parodies but it all appears to have started when Microsoft banned a user from Xbox Live for using ‘Hitler’ as nickname. Sometimes later, a video was uploaded on Youtube. It featured the scene from Downfall, superimposed with subtitles in English that had nothing to do with what Hitler was saying in German but were pertinent to the matter at the hand, in this case the Microsoft ban.

Since then hundreds of videos featuring the same scene but different subtitles (Telegraph has a nice list of 25 must watch Hitler parodies), have appeared, putting forward the web’s funny take on matters such as lack of camera in iPod, Usain Bolt breaking records, Sarah Palin’s resignation, subprime crisis, changes in Oktoberfest etc. Collectively the videos have been seen several million times on Youtube.

Nearly three years after Hitler found favour with the web as a comedian, Constantin Films, the company that made Downfall, is reading the riot act. Using a Youtube feature called Content ID that allows a copyright holder to remove their content from the Google-owned site, Constantin has started blocking the clips that featured scenes from its film.

The move has copyright activists up in arms who say Constantin is abusing Content ID tool and Youtube is wrong in allowing the film company a free run. They say because the videos are parodies, they are covered under the "fair use". And then there is uproar over the method used by Constantin. "If copyright owners want to block remix creativity, they should use a formal DMCA takedown notice (and be subject to legal punishment if they fail to consider fair use), rather than a coarse automated blocking tool," wrote Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Hitler parodies are innocuous in their own funny ways and given a bit of creative flair, anyone can use that particular scene from Downfall for some great comic effect on almost any given subject. Even the director of Downfall found them "funny". In January this year, Oliver Hirschbiegel told New York Magazine: "Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one… I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director."

Of course, if Constantin thinks it can win this copyright war, it seems to have been mistaken. The Hitler parodies are too many to be taken down. The fact that it is up against a hydra-headed monster is evident in some clips like this and this that have been uploaded on Youtube after Constantin started blocking Hitler parodies.

PS: Now that we are talking about internet memes, it would be unfair if I don’t point you to this video starring Prabhu Deva. It has been buffalaxed and if you are not among some 16 million people who have watched it so far, go see it now ;-). The video:

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Javed Anwer is a geek at heart, a man of gizmos, gadgets and games. He spends the better part of his nights, and sometimes days too, roaming the virtual alleys of WWW. When he is not on the Internet, he is most likely tweaking his computer to coax more out of it. When he is not doing any of these, he writes for The Times of India. In this blog, WebWise, he tries to document his rendezvous with technology.

Javed Anwer is a geek at heart, a man of gizmos, gadgets and games. He spends the better part of his nights, and sometimes days too, roaming the virtual all. . .